Paul Celan | Criticism

[Celan's] "Fugue of Death" ("Todesfuge") is perhaps the most celebrated poem on the subject of the Holocaust in Western Europe. During his years of alienation (and, presumably, incarceration), only one thing, Celan reports, remained attainable in the midst of the other casualties of war: language…. During those years and the ones following, Celan continues, he sought to write poems using that language, seeking direction and orientation, "in order to design for myself a reality." A living language lacking a vocabulary to describe what it has "seen," a poetic voice echoing silence as well as speech—these are two of the paradoxes that constitute the ingredients of Celan's poem, and much of the literature that succeeded it. The "Fugue of Death" seeks to create a reality about another reality in which speech proved lethal and silence laden with terror while the victim trembled helplessly between the two; the poet...